Jazz byRichard Cook
So far we have largely been spared the lulling ministrations of the radio music called "smooth jazz". In America it's become unshakeably established as a major format (and we don't even use the word "style" here - it's a "format" which has to be fed by "product"). Blandly shaped sax figures unfurl over clip-clop rhythms, or pianos arpeggiate the sweetest of nothings to a beat meant to soothe the most troublesome car journey or facilitate a less than straightforward tryst. It is music meant to be heard and not listened to and it would be harmless enough if its success hadn't pushed so many dollars in the direction of that music rather than "proper" jazz. The kind of simple noodling on which the method relies can be executed by most jazz players in their sleep, but there are some of us who'd rather hear them when they're awake, and the rise and rise of smooth has caused hand-wringing among much of the jazz audience.
Perhaps Europeans have some degree of resistance, since there are so far no major radio stations outside the US geared solely towards the format (although London's often troubled Jazz FM seems to be creeping ominously close). Mostly it's created a breed of musician whose mild manners define the soul of the sound. Names such as Boney James, Dave Koz and David Benoit will rarely win critical polls, but they muster many more listeners than Sonny Rollins and Branford Marsalis do now. Yet the overweening pleasantness of smooth should not mean the music is automatically purged of interest. It stems from the movement created in the 1960s by producers such as Creed Taylor, who had the idea of employing such masters as Wes Montgomery and Freddie Hubbard to play pretty rather than tough. Strings and arrangements as soft as thistledown did the rest. The only thing that has changed much is the cost: it's a lot cheaper to use synthesisers than a full orchestra. Unlike Koz and co, though, the original smoothies were first-generation jazzmen who didn't have to simulate feeling when they went through the gears.
One of the best of them was Stanley Turrentine, the original Mr T and as big and bold a saxophonist as any who came out of Pittsburgh, a great borough for rhythm-and-blues players. He often worked with his former wife, Shirley Scott, who played Hammond organ, and the music was the definition of soul food: plain but flavoursome, gutsy, always simmering on backbeats that Turrentine could play over for ever.
Although he apprenticed in Ray Charles's groups, Stan the Man wasn't really an R&B shouter. He liked to drop in moaning turns of phrase that put an oddly plaintive spin on what might otherwise have been bruising music. Perhaps it was that cajoling quality that took him into the kind of crossover success he enjoyed in the 1970s on albums that set the pace for commercial jazz at that point: Sugar, Pieces of Dreams, Straight Ahead. The material was still simple, bluesy stuff, and the sax playing was purringly effective, but Turrentine was cosseted by orchestras and vapid rhythm sections. Instead of a co-operative music, he sounded like a big man alone. But the pay cheques weren't bad, and who could begrudge him a pension fund?
Like his fellow saxman Grover Washington, he seems today like a late survivor of an old, neglected line of crossover monarchs. Recent years have found him troubled by illness and some records have been dreadfully thin. A new set for the Concord label, Do You Have Any Sugar?, plays like a cautious mix of the different styles in which Turrentine has spent his life. The producer, John Burk, surrounds him with canny old sessionmen on several tracks for a harmless smooth-jazz goulash. Three songs with vocals by one Niki Harris are faceless fluff. But sift that out and you get to four small-group pieces with his old friends Joe Sample at the piano and Ray Brown on bass, and the old man blossoms into his warmest and most congenial form. He's sweet enough by himself, thanks.
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